NOOKcolor

There's a great line in the movie Apollo 13 where Gene Kranz, the flight director of the mission, says "I don't care what it's designed to do, I care what it CAN do!" That couldn't be more true for the Barnes and Noble NOOKcolor eBook reader which is turning into a pretty adaptable Android tablet. The latest hack comes from CM7 Developer "Kmoobs" who managed to bring bluetooth capability to it through CM7 Nightly for Encore which takes advantage of the hidden bluetooth capability of the NookColor's WiFi chip. The capability is turned off in the software and CM7 Nightly for Encore re-enables it.

Apparently the creators of NOOKcolor (and Nook) are continuing to insist that these aren't simply Android tablets locked up and ready for reading. Can you imagine? Indeed there are big initiatives being set forth by Barnes & Noble, in all seriousness now, to push their Self-Publishing Author program PubIt! to the forefront. In the Android Community there's been a big bunch of excitement at the hacking and freeing of the NOOKcolor as of late, but we've got to remember that indeed this device was made for reading books, and it does continue to do so. Barnes & Noble is holding their first in-store event for Pub-It tonight.

Oh you didn't know that NOOKcolor had been rooted and taken far beyond its innocent book-reading beginnings? Oh it's been brought far, far beyond. In a video posted by juicedigital, a rooted version of the Barnes & Noble Android tablet is shown to not only be rocking pretty hard playing music, surfing the internet, and downloading apps from the Android Marketplace, it's essentially nearly got GPS map functionality and is changing the in-car life of this intrepid hacker / modder.

News has it that Barnes & Noble have stopped shipments of their successful NOOKcolor Android tablet ereader. This color reader has seen great coverage in the Android developer community because of its enticing hardware and locked nature. While Barnes & Noble have intended this device to be used strictly for reading, sharing, and purchasing books (and down the line apps for reading as well,) it's been met with some fast moving code tricks and hacks that have allowed avid coders to break its system wide open. When open, this ereader becomes more of a fabulous looking, nicely sized, fully functional Android tablet. What's all this got to do with shipments?

Just yesterday an unofficial port of Honeycomb was made available on the NOOKcolor that was based on the official Google emulator and various other sources. The original developer has been hard at work and has now updated the port with some stability improvements and sound.

You've seen Honeycomb running on the NOOKcolor in photos and on video; now you can try it yourself. xda-developers has released a Honeycomb ROM for the Barnes & Noble ereader tablet, based on the official Google emulator and various other sources.
So far, graphics acceleration, wireless, the touchscreen, buttons and accelerometer all work, but sound and DSP (including hardware video decoding) are still works-in-progress. Nonetheless, this is a handy way to get a jump on Google's official Honeycomb reveal tomorrow if you've got a NOOKcolor to hand; if you haven't, head over to our Honeycomb deep dive instead.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Update: Our old friend Steve Troughton-Smith has put together a walkthrough video:
[youtube X2kJaVnXhPQ]

Would you like to see Honeycomb running on a Motorola XOOM? Wait a second, that's not gonna happen until we show it to you a few weeks (or a few days) down the road. Alright, how about we take a look at it on NOOKcolor instead? Sounds good! The folks at XDA Developers have you covered! Check it out.

Ever since we first laid eyes upon NOOKcolor, we knew it'd perform well for the world - once it was rooted, of course. That was a few weeks ago. A couple days ago, an SDK of Android 3.0 Honeycomb was released. Today Honeycomb has been ported to NOOKcolor. What a wonderful system we've got here.

Barnes & Noble has released a new firmware update for the NOOKcolor ereader. v1.1.1 mainly consists of tweaks and bugfixes, but those using the 7-inch slate primarily as a tablet will likely be pleased by the addition of pinch-zooming support in the browser.
The full changelist is below, and you can download the update here.